Global efforts to protect elephant populations today are hampered by contentious disagreement over the best conservation policy, write a team of leading researchers from 14 institutions, including Yale. On the one side are those calling for an international ban on the ivory trade. On the other are those who believe that a closely regulated trade is the only way to save elephants.

One of the authors is Gao Yufang, a doctoral student in the combined degree program between the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and Yale’s Department of Anthropology, who has studied how human values affect decisions by stakeholders at every step of the ivory trade, from the local communities where elephants are killed to the Chinese communities where the ivory products are purchased.